Yes. This is how I first learned pointers when I was learning C. It makes perfect sense in C so long as you don't get crazy with typedefs or function pointers. It really breaks down in C++ where you have operator overloading that results in a situation where you have multiple types of iterators and smart pointers that all dereference to the same type.

Once you add references into the mix and it gets really confusing. I'm not really sure why they reused the ampersand to represent a reference type. Were there no other symbols left? It doesn't even follow the same rule from C. "int a" means that a is of type int. "int &a" does not mean that &a is of type int. Blah.

The cruft is ever building, but it started out very intuitive. Oh well.